Sunday, August 31, 2008

 

Thinking more on code, invitation still open

Having had experience with going it alone with my Class Viewer project I'm reticent about doing a lone coder project again, but may do so, eventually if I must. Until I decide to do that though I'll say that I'd like to be more of an architect as well as the project owner on this one, and have a project manager who gets the other coders, and brings the project to fruition.

And the project is building what I hope is an optimal path engine based on some rather simple ideas inspired by considering the Traveling Salesman Problem with the simple addition of a backwards traveler going backwards in time through the optimal path to the forwards traveler going forwards, so that at the end you collapse to a single traveler going forwards in time, where the key minima is minimizing the total cost at each decision point as the travelers move towards each other.

In a sense I made up a global variable which can in some sense encompass the full map, which it should do perfectly with the Euclidean TSP, and can do in steps with other TSP's where the most random costs give it the most trouble, but still the problem is handled by the algorithm with O(n^3), so it's polynomial time, where n is the count of nodes.

Thinking more on design it seems to me that naturally there will be two travelers in the code, and nodes, and a node map, which could just about be it, so it seems like it should be easy enough to code, but I want a testing environment that has some kind of a GUI and I need something that is an engine in that it is easily plugged into a variety of environments.

If the main idea does work well, then it'd be rather cool, but even if it doesn't, are there any coders who might go for a project just for the fun of coding something even kind of wacky from scratch?

And if you like visibility, you have that, as just Google "optimal path engine" to see where the project will sit in rankings.

Because the project is high profile when it comes to people who might be interested I have to be able to Google you to see what you've done. So if you want on this project and don't have anything searchable, then make something that is, and fast.





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